Greetings, bee-botherers and those interested in the care of honey bees with the goal of producing honey and bees for sale. I have been AWOL, I deserted my post, by which I mean that I haven’t written anything on here for many moons. There are reasons – call them excuses if you will – but … Read more
Spring is the perfect time to make queens — the bees are already primed to do it. From simple queenless splits to a double-nuc cell builder that produces 20 quality cells per batch, here’s how to work with the bees rather than against them.
Whether you want to raise a handful of queens without grafting, turn a swarm-prone double-brood colony into two thriving units, or run a continuous cell-building system through the summer, there’s an approach here that suits your scale and ambition. The bees already know how to do this; your job is simply to set up the right conditions.
No specialist equipment required — just a nucleus box, good timing, and a willingness to let the bees do what they do best. Queen rearing is one of the most rewarding skills in beekeeping, and it is far more accessible than most beekeepers realise.
Beekeepers blame queens for everything from bad temper to poor honey crops. But quality in the strict sense means one thing: reproductive competency. Here is what the research says about how to assess it — and why the old timers saying queens aren’t what they used to be may well be right.
How brief pollen shortages can weaken colonies weeks later I was going to write about the so-called “June gap” – a period between spring and summer when, at least in my area, the available forage for honey bees can dry up. However, the phenomenon can occur anytime, and it connects to apiary site selection, migratory … Read more
Word has reached me through the beekeeping grapevine that colony losses this winter have been high, particularly in the South and East of England. Time will tell whether this plays out, but my information from certain sellers of queens and nucleus colonies seems to support that story. Pre-orders of queens and nucs are skyrocketing. My … Read more
When I was a child, obesity was much less common than it is now, and we ate things like lard. In fact, lardy cake was a delicious treat that I used to purchase on a Saturday from a baker shop in Brockenhurst (they still sell it occasionally). We ate bacon and eggs, steak and kidney … Read more
“Keep local bees.” Or, increasingly, “Keep locally adapted bees.” It’s among the most repeated lines in UK beekeeping, usually delivered with the confidence of a law of physics. And to be fair, it often works as advice. Local queens can perform well, and local colonies can overwinter reliably. But the phrase “local bees” is doing … Read more
What the evidence shows, and what it doesn’t Since the late 1990s, varroa resistance has resurfaced repeatedly — Africanised bees, the Gotland survivors, hygienic breeding programmes, and more recently treatment-free narratives — each time framed as a solution, and each time constrained by ecology, genetics, and scale. Talks promise it, social media celebrates it, and … Read more